What do you do if you are a mostly close combat army with poor firefight (Blood Angels), versus an Eldar army comprising almost entirely of skimmers that can choose to prevent you ever engagine them in melee?

I have about 2000 of my 3k points invested in Sang Guard/Terminators/Assault marines that all can be denied their CC at will?

I think he has 1 detachment that isnt either skimmers or sorrounded by skimmer transports to act as fodder to get touched in base to base and then declare themselves skimming so i never get my macro weapon attacks or 3+ CC attacks and am reduced to mostly a single 5+ FF per stand

This might seem too obvious, but "shoot 'em" is probably a decent start - make those Predators and Stormravens do some work with their AT shots.

If the skimmers are screening other ground units, and you've got the movement and the numbers, you can engage the skimmer screen with one unit each, then your other units can move past them to get to the squishies behind (this is how mechanised Orks would do it - not sure if Blood Angel formations have the numbers to pull that off). You can also do this by barging through with a Thunderhawk.

Changing your force comp to be a bit more balanced might also be something to think about - you're bringing a knife to a gunfight. (Okay, it's more like a chainsaw made of lightsabers than a mere knife, but still, a gun or two would be handy.) A few more formations with decent FF and/or long-range firepower (Stormraven-mounted Devastators and Bikes both look pretty good) would give you more tools to work with.

If all else fails, just keep hittin' 'em. You'll inflict casualties with each assault, even if you lose, and Marines don't care nearly as much about getting broken as other forces do. Your first assault might fail. Your second assault might (barely) fail. Your third and/or fourth assault will break the formation and wipe them out.

So i show up at the club every week, skake his hand, go home and dont play epic?

Seems like a point the community should address?

Seems unfair to have a basically invicible army that negates almost my entire force

It's not basically invincible, it's a match-up issue. You get those with every war game I've ever come across. Your Blood Angels are going to be a nightmare to a lot of lists, Eldar skimmers are your worst case scenario. It happens. Warmachine deals with it by taking multiple lists and/or a sideboard to competitive games. Unfortunately that's harder with something like Epic.

Don't rely on 2000pt of pure CC maybe? There's a reason devastators are generally taken over assault marines (besides adding dreadnoughts into the mix) is that they can handle skimmers and back up multiple formations within support range. Assault marines not so much....

The terminators wouldn't be too bad if they're tactical terminators they become reinforced armour devastators at that point if they're pure assault termies than yeah... bit out of luck there.... it is a bad match up though

Use your AT to soften up the target, use your mobility to get clipping engagements you win by weight of BMs and chaplains - and use Thunderhawk barging air assaults to completely ignore skimmer screens and annihilate the non-skimmer forces.

There's a reason devastators are generally taken over assault marines (besides adding dreadnoughts into the mix) is that they can handle skimmers and back up multiple formations within support range.

I do think there's a strange imbalance between CC and FF built into the game mechanics - those stats are treated as being of roughly equal 'value' (like Devastators and Assault Marines having mirrored 3+/5+) but they're really not. The fact that Devs are way more common than Assaults speaks quite clearly to that, I think.

It's comparatively difficult to get units into CC, but very easy to get into FF. Launching a CC assault always requires you to start at least 15cm closer to the enemy. There's practically no way to create a CC 'clipping assault'. CC can't be used to support other formations in their attacks. Special rules can force the enemy to use FF, but there are none that force the use of CC. It's perfectly viable to run a force that focuses almost exclusively on FF, but tactical suicide to run a force that's mainly CC. The only saving grace of CC is that there are more units with EA and MW/TK attacks in CC than FF.

That's my Ork rant for the day. It's not easy being green. My Boyz just want to krump some 'eads.

Joined: Thu May 24, 2007 5:56 pm Posts: 3240
Location: On the Otherside of the Breach

Devs in Storm Ravens would be my suggestion

Also look at a Spaceship perhaps for a nice orbital barrage that can put at least BM on formations and at best rid you of some AV and it should force him out of castling and making engagements more to your advantage.

It's not an ideal matchup (although point for point you probably come out ahead even if you can't CC the expensive skimmers), but the usual solution is to have Devastators shoot the skimmers then the cc units assault them, getting the devastators' fire fight support.

Going too heavily towards cc over ff does get you more attacks and macro for your buck but will also make your army more matchup sensitive.

Really focused lists will always come with more extreme match ups. A really strong theme can be fun to design, but in practice it can produce a lot of games where the list match up decides the game rather than anything the players do.

I think the best option would be to look at lists that aren't so heavily dependent on CC.

From my limited time in the game, I think one of the strengths of Epic is that it tends to encourage more generalised lists. Because a game is decided by destroying the enemy, taking objectives and holding objectives, the best lists will have units that are effective in all three roles. Unlike a lot of other games where the strongest tournament lists tend to be really focused on one kind of platform and one type of attack, in Epic the strongest lists seem to have more diversity. As a result Epic doesn't seem to have the issue that impacts a lot of other games where the more competitive you get, the more games are decided by match ups rather than player skill (and luck).

Interesting point - though I think there's a caveat that certain areas of focus come with almost no limitations or downsides.

An army focused on heavy-hitting CC units, for example, will have a much harder time against Skimmers. An army focused on War Engines will have a harder time against opponents with a high activation count. An army focused on Planetfalling can be thrown into disarray by an enemy with a competing spaceship and a higher Strategy rating.

BUT

An army focused on mobility will do just fine. An army focused on powerful FF units is perfectly capable of taking on anything. An army focused on long-range bombardments is pretty viable. An army focused on air assault is flexible and powerful (even if the opponent brings a fair bit of AA fire).

I think the underlying principle is that some tactics have counters, and others do not. It's basically impossible to stop an enemy raining artillery fire on your forces, engaging them in firefights, or moving across the board. In comparison, it's relatively easy (for certain armies) to stop opponents engaging in CC.

I'd say that's a huge part of list building - working out what your list strategy's counters are. If you can account for each formation's weakness with a supporting formation that mitigates or counters that weakness, or better yet simply have very few weaknesses, then you'll likely get solid results from the list unless it's horribly inefficient. If there's a specific counter that applies to a large proportion of your forces, then you've made a pair of scissors that's just waiting for a rock.

It would be nice if the game did slightly more to make certain tactics less powerful. For example, I'd love it if units could use their counter-assault move to leave the 15cm engagement range of the attacking formation. That change would make clipping engagements significantly more difficult to pull off, and allow for a more realistic response to the threat - if enemy combatants engage you with small arms fire at long range, and all you've got is an axe, doesn't it make more sense to fall back slightly and regroup rather than rush into the killzone and die?

I also wish that the Slow and Steady rule limited spaceship arrivals to turn 2+ rather than 3+, since that rule alone pretty much invalidates any Planetfall-heavy list, by simple virtue of the fact that an enemy ship can clog up the spacelanes so your troops can't arrive until turn 4 (sorry, the game ended on turn 3). The limitations placed on Planetfall compared to Teleport arrival (aerospace requirement, pre-plotting, scatter, deployment area restriction) also seem overly harsh.

Anyway, I agree that it's great that the game encourages 'generalised' lists (perhaps 'flexible' might be a better term, since you can viably create lists containing a small selection of highly focused unit types which nevertheless can achieve all the objectives necessary to win).